Booted out of game

[dribbler]

Hello all, and greetings as this is my first post.
I play Civ4/Warlords on 2 different computers, but have a similar problem on both of them. i.e. random and sometimes frequent booting out of the game. One computer spontaneously re-boots back to win xp for no obvious reason at various points in the game, the other just backs out of the game. I get the Microsoft ' Civ4 had to close, sorry for the inconvenience....' and 'tell us about it' box. As I'm not on the internet, naturally I decline.
This is frustrating, as obviously all moves are lost back to the last save.
Both computers have good-to-middling video cards with up-to-date drivers and have no symptoms of graphical overload. One pc is a 3gig AMD, the other a 2.2 gig. So, no minimum req. issue.
If the booting out happened at or near end-game, then I could assume it was just a graphical overload problem, but I get it right at the start of a game sometimes. There is no consistency.
And only Civ4/Warlords does this. All other apps/games operate ok.
And the Warlords patch made no difference.
Anyone else experiencing similar problems? Anyone got any theories/ideas?
Thanks in advance.
Dribbler.

 

[Strato]

Could you specify more system details, as in how much ram present, video card etc.
Larger maps are harder on the memory than smaller maps, as are high detail textures etc. It sounds like Civ IV is basically throwing in the towel because it is running out of system resources to carry out the AI calculations etc.

 

[T.A JONES]

Map to big . Army and Civs to many.

Vir Mem and Ram to small.

Money you must spend

 

[dribbler]

Hi,
Thanks for your suggestions. I use 1 gig of memory in each pc.
Video cards are: nvidia geforce 6600 GT and a radeon 9800SE. I cut the resolution from high to medium.
Being thrown out can happen at the start of a game, when only a few units are present.
I give up on this. I now save after every turn and often more than once during a long turn.
Later this year I will get a new top-end pc.
The requirements printed on the Civ IV box are hopelessly inadequate.
Dribbler

 

[sabo]

Sounds like me before I spent $200 on a video card, I had a good system but it had just an on-board video card. Driibler have you tried reinstalling?

 

[T.A JONES]

Sounds like me before I spent $200 on a video card, I had a good system but it had just an on-board video card. Driibler have you tried reinstalling?

Yes Sir quite true in my case.
My onboard was so bad that when I upgraded to a lousy 128 9550 it gave me noticable upgrades in turn times on CIv3's megehuge maps. That game had max specs required of 60mb and under 1.0 processor. On most setups the onboard is allocated to much memory in bios. It also steal vitual memory that being whats helpful when your sytem is looking extra space at a cruch time, not there an you get the boot.
With onboard using far more then is needed, I found getting a seperate card of any kind on the market will be very benificial.

Still don't get any ideas of playing huge maps with 18 civs or anything, atleast not into moder age. The games just not programmed to be responsive to this kind of punishment. Complaints of 1.5 gb ram not doing the trick on 3.0 processors is all to common.

 

[Stolen Rutters]

The game occasionally crashes for me but not often enough for me to do anything other than make sure autosave is set for every four turns (I don't like losing more than that).

The big thing that seems to be helping some people with memory problems is by actually turning off the swaying trees of all things. I have never tried it because I don't play on the bigger maps so my RAM seems to be fine (not enough free time in real life to play larger maps and actually finish games).

 

[CliftonBazaar]

First of all change the settings to make it autosave each turn (PM if you don't know how to do it).

Turn the music off - this made the biggest differance for me. I have my own MP3's running in the background.

James